Google Spanner Inspires CockroachDB To Outrun It

February 22, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is an old joke that in the post-apocalyptic world that comes about because of plague or nuclear war, only two things will be left alive: cockroaches and Keith Richards, the guitarist for the Rolling Stones. As it hails from New York City, you can understand why Cockroach Labs, the upstart software company that is cloning Google’s Spanner distributed relational database, chose that particular bug to epitomize a system that will stay alive no matter what. But, they could have just as easily called it RichardsDB.

When discussing Google’s cloud implementation of Spanner, which launched in beta earlier this …